25. Swamp Things
From the safety of Pyt's drum hut, the party fight a shambling mound and some will-o-wisps. ** The wisps are using their shock attacks to heal the mound. ** Clwyd is turned into a giant ape by Wilfred after she is engulfed by the mound. ** Wilfred eventually loses concentration, Clwyd is engulfed again and is dying. Quinn pulls her out the mass of vines and heals her up with a healer's kit. ** Pyt turns himself into a mammoth. ** Malak gets the final blow on the mound, killing it. The wisps flee. * The party find the mound's root-stem among the rotting detritus of its corpse. It looks like a piece of black wood with a faintly glowing fractal pattern on it. ** Wilfred dispels the magic on the root-stem. ** As the magic dissipates, Malak intuits that the mound had been born of a storm in some way. ** Clwyd informs the group that the island they're on is roughly in the storm path, meaning it's hit by the full force of the migratory storms at least once a year. * The next day, they explore the swamp. ** They note that there are no large creatures in the place. Mostly just birds, frogs, snakes, insects, and the like. ** They find the top of a stone hut that had been a troll's house. The building seems to have sunk into the swamp, but there's a small hole in the top that leads within. ** Before they descend, Wilfred catches sight of a large, injured creature in the forest that's watching them. It runs away, but not before the gnome surmises that it was about the size of Bigly. * The party head under the swamp. ** They find a series of worked-clay tunnels that link the igloo-like stone troll huts under the swamp's surface. ** A swarm of stirges - animals that look like a cross between a bat and a mosquito - attack the party in one of the troll huts. The party eventually kills them all. ** There's a trail of small, circular footprints in the bat shit on the ground. The group follow it to another hole that descends downwards again, into another dome-shaped room. ** They descend and find that this lower room is much the same as the ones above, though it opens up to more of a cavern. ** The 'cavern' they are now in has a stone floor and roof, with a number of the troll huts on this level serving like support pillars for the ceiling and that above it. The walls resemble packed earth. There are also a tonne of bio-luminescent mushrooms around the place. ** Wilfred concludes that the trolls who lived here were idiots. Their homes kept sinking into the swamp, so they just kept laying a floor of stone down on top of them and then building their houses on top of that, only for it to eventually sink as well. ** Wilfred approaches some of the mushrooms and one of the larger ones gives off a piercing screech, revealing itself to be shrieker fungi. The party hear a large number of figures stirring from all around the cavern in response to the sound. Category:Part Three